Cabinet of Curiosities

marksbirch:

I read the tech press not for information, but for comic relief. In fact, they should use Comic Sans font on their blogs just to emphasize the point. The sheer inanity of it all led me to post last month the top ten most annoying memes in the startup scene, but I clearly could…

austinkleon:

mlarson:

When I was reading this New Atlantis article on self-help, I found mention of Ben Franklin’s ingenious plan for becoming a better writer: imitation, summary, repeated practice. He set up lessons for himself, varying ways of copying from The Spectator…

1. One method was picking an essay, summarizing every sentence with a brief “hint”, setting those summaries aside for a while, and then trying to recreate the essays from his own notes. Then he’d compare to the original and see where he came up short.
2. Sometimes he’d put these hints on separate sheets, jumble them all up, and set them aside for a few weeks. Then he’d try to re-order them and re-write the essay, and compare his with the original.
3. To work on his vocabulary, he transformed the prose stories into poetry, waited a while so the memory was no longer fresh, and then turned them back into prose again.

Dang. Who has time for all that? Basically everyone with discipline: “My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship…”

Auto re-blog! Thing is: this is how thinkers have done it for thousands of years. You copy your heroes. You learn their moves. You combine those moves, transform them into your own thing. (Now, off to finish that chapter in the book…)

The Facebook Editions initiative, part of Facebook’s “Read, Watch, Listen” strategy, is aimed at keeping more media consumption within its borders. While details are still emerging, the idea is that Facebook users will be able to download apps containing content from their favorite…